However you look at it, today’s major operating systems take a lot of resources. We run high performance applications like video games that could go to such better lengths with our machines had they not have to run on top of operating systems like Windows.
If you have a modern system with 12 GB of RAM, it obviously does not really matter. Most often you will most likely find the majority of applications on your system run perfectly fine while your friend might argue with you they are too slow to work with on older computers.
However, if you have such wares as a netbook, memory usage might be something you want to have an eye out for. Having a netbook is like stepping back 5 or 6 years in computing power and the speed and efficiency of the applications you run become crucial.
For example, Windows 7 on a netbook is already the very limit of what you can run as an operating system. It will eat at least half a gigabyte of RAM and will limit your use of your netbook to applications that can fit in the rest, which is most often less than 50% of your total RAM.
However, take Chrome OS, which will most likely take substantially less memory (it’s just a browser after-all), and you’ve got a different story. Your netbook might gain as much as twice its previous memory capacity for running software.
If Google was ever to enable the development of native applications for Chrome OS, a simple thing to do because it’s Linux based, your netbook’s potential as a browser-only platform will surely change. Any long-time professional software user will tell you that although current-day pro software like Photoshop take a modern computer to run, they used to be able to use Photoshop on the older computers, which were new at that time.
Chrome OS brings the same power back to older computers and most specifically netbooks. High-performance compiled web apps destined to these very netbooks might not be so far-fetched after all.
